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Only one firm matters

An extraordinary proportion of people with training and experience in finance have worked at the highest levels of every recent presidential administration. Four of the last six secretaries of the Treasury fit this description. In fact , all four were directly or indirectly connected to one firm: Goldman Sachs. This is hardly the historical norm : of the previous six Treasury secretaries, only one had a finance background .

In 2001, following revelations of accounting irregularities, Enron verged on collapse, which meant that Citigroup, a major lender, would lose a significant amount of money. Fulfilling a request made by Michael Carpenter, head of Citigroup’s investment banking unit, Rubin called Peter R . Fisher, then undersecretary of the Treasury and asked him to consider advising the bond – rating agencies against an immediate downgrade of Enron’s debt. In other words , Rubin (a Democrat ) lobbied Fisher (a Republican ) to help bail out Enron. ( So much for Washington’s ideological divide.)

What Rubin did was technically legal, as The Economist explained, only because Bill Clinton , in his last days as president , had canceled an executive order that barred top officials from lobbying their old departments for five years after leaving office.

Source: Zingales, Luigi. A Capitalism for the People: Recapturing the Lost Genius of American Prosperity (p. 68). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

Today, of course, there is far more money riding on the models than in the 1980s – and when it comes to positive feedback, size matters. Indeed, another example of positive feedback is the relationship between the financial sector and regulators. As the sector increases in size, it gains more influence over the government; this allows it to change regulations in its favor, which allows it to grow even larger, and so on, until it becomes Goldman Sachs.

Sometimes called Government Sachs, because of the remarkable ability of its alumni to go straight into senior levels of government, perhaps related to the fact that the firm is a leading corporate donor to political campaigns (Baram, 2009). It is even better represented at central banks. Four of the Federal Reserve’s 12 regional banks are currently headed by former Goldman Sachs executives. Only five banks have voting power, in a rotating fashion, and in 2017 ex-Goldmanites will hold four of these votes. Together with Mark Carney at the Bank of England and Mario Draghi at the European Central Bank, this means that interest rate decisions for much of the world’s economy are made by people who came from a single firm. Nothing to see here, move along.